Porn & Credit Card discrimination

The shoots:
I’m going to be shooting some vampire themed and horror photoshoots to go up on my website. However some of the ideas I wanted incorperate into the photoshoots such asmenstruation cunnilingus, thigh biting, blood on the ground in the shape of a summoning / demon type ritual, etc, I am unable to do for the following reasons.

The problem:
My website is a porn site where people get memberships. For my membership site, folks pay for membership with a credit card. That means as a business owner, I have to get permission from the credit card companies (Mastercard and VISA mainly) to be able to do so. Visa/MC only allow certain services to use their credit card services, and impose restrictions on what folks can and can’t do. As such, they have a blanket ban on certain things, many of which are perfectly logical such as things involving kids, animals, drugs, violence etc etc.

This is because Visa/MC don’t want to be associated or part of illegal activities. Makes sense.

However, some things fall under the blanket ban that are silly in certain contexts such as blood, gore and weaponry. For example:

It’s against Visa/MC terms of service to have sex / nudity / general adult content depicting or implying violence, coercion, rape, torture, gore etc. Sounds legit. However, by their ruling if I take my clothes off, put on vampire fangs and have tomato sauce dripping from the side of my mouth and then take a picture for my website- that falls under the category of violence/obscenity, because it’s a photo on an adult site, featuring adult content (nudity) that contains depictions of violence (blood) and coercion (fangs=weaponry/violence). Now thats silly! Menstruation porn is outright banned which I think is sexist and prudish as fuck! The same applies to weapons like daggers or guns being in shot, even if they are not being used or held, because according to VISA/MC that would be classified as violence. Yep. So no naked, blood smeared, sword toting Red Sonya nude photos of me for anyone! Sad, sad face.

Now, I can understand WHY these things are in place. If I had another person in the photo and I was holding a knife, or had blood on me like could look like rape/coercion/violence. Fair enough. However, the rule still applies to me in sets by myself, which is kind of stupid but there you have it. Now there are sites that have these things, and I’ve heard it comes down to ‘context, but that is NOT stated in their Terms of Service. As such I can’t gamble my buisness on rumour, I have to go with the rules that are written out for me. It’s a sticky situation.

I’m currently in the process of taking some sample shots of the explicit content that features blood and me holding weapons to send to a MasterCard and Visa adult rep to get feedback as to if it’s ok or not. Hopefully in context I’ll be allowed to do it, but it’s not a guarantee. I’ve seen people not allowed to do a lot less, and other folks being allowed to shoot much more violent things and get away with it. It seems it comes down to random credit card company worker deciding if they like it or not. Awkward grey area of personal bias is awkward.

So what does that mean? I can’t do those things and run my business- right now. If VISA/MC sees them during a periodical random audit of the site they will cut me off, so no one will be able to use a credit card to sign up for my site. As most other payment methods such as paypal don’t allow adult transactions, and as credit card usage doubles as age verification for adult services, if VISA/MC banned someone from using their services for obscene/illegal content, they’d be up shit creek. Considering over 97% of customers use VISA, without it I’d have no viable way to accept payments and my business would cease to be. This also has nothing to do about where my business is registered, or the server is hosted. These rules are from the credit card companies.

I will still be shooting the Vampire series. I just have to adjust what I wanted to shoot, and wait till I hear back from the credit card companies to see what they will and won’t allow. Worst comes to worst I’ll still find a way to shoot them, it just won’t be what I wanted.